For those of you turning to the dictionary, manumissions are the documents promising the freedom of enslaved humans. Despite our popular image, Quakers enslaved Africans for over a century, starting with Quaker on Barbados in the 1660s. That island was the first fabulously successful British colony in the Western Hemisphere and that economy was built on sugar and slaves. Quaker missionaries converted slave-owning White Barbadians.¹

Barbados became less friendly to Quakers in following decades (repressive laws, natural disasters) and many moved to William Penn’s new colony in the 1680s, bringing their enslaved people and a Quaker acceptance of human bondage with them. Katherine Gerbner’s “Slavery in the Quaker World” is a good place to start with this history (and yes, I interviewed her too a few years ago).

Some Friends started formally writing against slavery starting in 1688 but rich, slave-holding Friends (including William Penn) didn’t agree and the protests were shelved. It wasn’t until 1776 that Friends in Philadelphia formally acknowledged that human bondage and Quaker principles were opposed. Slave-owning Friends had two choices: free those in their bondage or be disowned from the religious society.

The manumission papers are the receipts of the former Friends. Copies of the freedom promises were sent up the chain of Quaker bureaucracy as proof and eventually ended up in the archives of Haverford College.

My first interview, “Inside Haverford’s Manumission Archives,” is with David Satten-López, the Haverford fellowship student who digitized a portion of these records, and Mary Crauderueff, who heads Haverford’s Quaker collections.

The second interview is a video conversation with Avis Wanda McClinton, a strong voice on remembering the Quaker history of forced bondage.

I’m so glad we’re talking about this tragic history more and happy that folks like Avis, Mary, and David have let me be part of the conversation.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

As a lover of maps, I’ve often be intrigued by the environs  of the Delaware River. As the tides go up and down, the timelessness of the river becomes a kind of gentle solace to the industrialization along its banks. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the islands which somehow remain in its course. I’ve camped at Pea Patch Island down by Delaware and found a surprising family connection in its convoluted ownership. But closer to my commute is Petty Island, sitting alongside the New Jersey mainland a short distance north of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Petty Island is owned by the Citgo oil company and until just a few months ago was still dotted with its oil tanks and a large marine cargo facility. Satellite views still show this twentieth century industry. But in a very long and oftentimes-uncertain process it’s due to become part of New Jersey natural lands and eventually to become a preserve. The public is generally still not allowed on the island but there are occasional trips and on this past Saturday I got to tour the island.

We were very lucky to have Bob Shinn as our tour guide. He’s a walking encyclopedia of the island and the state geopolitics and waves of names and commercial uses it’s been through. He literally wrote the entry on Petty Island in the Philadelphia Encyclopedia. Not surprisingly there’s a lot of Quakers in the early recorded history and the deed between the first Quaker owner and three Lenape representatives is intact in the Haverford College collections (this deed was also a major part of a talk by Lenape–settler history given by Jean Soderlund a few months ago at Rancocas Meeting (see also her book Lenape Country)).

The ever-changing, never-settled history of the island continues with its name. Wikipedia, Google Maps, and—most importantly—Bob Shinn call it “Petty Island,” while the guard shack, welcome sign, NJ Audubon Society, and New Jersey Natural Lands Trust adds the possessive to make it “Petty’s Island.” The latter is especially awkward-sounding to my ears, as South Jersey place names characteristically drop the apostrophes over time (for example, the river landing named after Captain George May is now the town of “Mays Landing.”)

Remnants of the industrialization remain: the massive three-story loading facility has been kept to become the bones of a future visitors center; the adjacent asphalt parking area has just been replanted as a meadow and is mostly a lot of rocks and short blades of grass (with some Fowler’s toads!). We were lucky enough to be the first public group to be there since this had all been cleared away.

Bonus: I didn’t realize till we were about to get in our cars that South Jersey Trails was also on the tour. He wrote it up too! If you look carefully, I’m in the background of one of the shots, and now that I’m looking I think that’s him in some of mine.

The archival material in the Library relating to William Penn includes property deeds relating to land in Pennsylvania, such as the one pictured below. There are also letters from William Penn amongst other people’s papers. One notable example, dated 13th of 11th month 1690 (13 January 1691, in the modern calendar), is a letter from him to Margaret Fox, formerly Margaret Fell, telling her of the death of her husband, George Fox.

William Penn: commemorations and curios

It sounds like there have been lots of momentos made from the elm tree under which William Penn is said to have signed a treaty with the Lenape in 1683. The Penn Treaty Park museum has stirring accounts of the storm that tore the tree from its roots in 1810. There were so many relic hunters hacking off pieces of the fallen tree that the owners of the property owners hired a guard. Their solution was the obvious capitalist one: chop the remainder up and sell it.

According to an article on the Haverford College site, cuttings of the original tree were taken in its lifetime and trees have been propagated from its lineage for a few generations now. Haverford recently planted a “great grandchild” of the original treaty elm on its campus to replace a fallen grandchild. Newtown Meeting in nearby Bucks County has a great great grandchild.

The idea of Quaker relics and trees imbued with special properties because of a lineage of placement doesn’t really jive very well with many Friends’ ideas of the Quaker testimonies. But I’m glad that the treaty is remembered. The tree had served as a sort of memorial; with its demise, a group came together to more properly remember the location and commemorate the treaty.

You have things like membership records, marriage records, and marriage certificates. You have minutes of the business meetings and you have committee minutes. Other cool things that we have are deeds for meetings and meetinghouses. People will sometimes come to various Quaker archives and say, “Our meeting is in this dispute with the township. We need to find the original deed to the meetinghouse and we think that you have it. Can we look at it?”

http://Quakerspeak.com/working-in-a-historical-quaker-library/